


A Pirate's Life At Thirty

by psocoptera



Series: Thirty Fic [19]
Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: 30Fic, Fountain of Youth, Kid Fic, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-29
Updated: 2009-09-29
Packaged: 2018-02-10 19:27:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2037102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psocoptera/pseuds/psocoptera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elizabeth drinks from the Fountain of Youth.  It complicates everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Pirate's Life At Thirty

Elizabeth wakes up when something tickles her nose. Will's hair, she thinks sleepily, and nearly rolls right out of the hammock when she goes to fling her leg over him and he isn't there.

"Gack!" she says inelegantly, catching herself with the arm that had reached out for Will with a lucky grab onto the thick rope that edges the big hammock. Her other arm flops briefly around, looking vainly for purchase on the feather mattress, until she manages to throw her hips back towards the center of the bed. There's a soft _whump_ and a small flurry of white feathers fly up from somewhere beside her; they drift silently back down onto her naked belly like warm snowflakes, and she has a sudden guess as to what had tickled her.

Someone snickers. "I beg your pardon," Will says, overly formal in the way that means he's a little offended but trying to hide it, "Until such time as time levels us, you might bear with me when I try these things..."

Elizabeth blinks a little and pushes herself up on her elbow. Sun is streaming into the cabin through the many-paned window; the far wall, where it hits, almost seems to glow.

Will has Jack up against the wall, one hand splayed on his shoulder, bracing him, his other hand somewhere between them. Jack is looking over his shoulder at her, grinning.

"Morning, love," he says, batting his eyelashes.

"Ah," Will says, mollified, "Your Queen awakes."

" _King_ \- " she starts to reply, but Jack is faster: "Your King too, _pirate_ ," he says, leaning forward into Will's ear and trailing a be-ringed hand down the back of his neck.

"Will was just telling me," he continues caressingly, ostensibly addressing Elizabeth but still speaking right into Will's ear, "Of his expectation that, with sufficient passage of time, these few prior years of mine will be but a drop in the sloshing bucket of our joint experience and he will, in a word, catch up. What he _fails_ to realize," and Will gives a little jump; Elizabeth can't see Jack's other hand at all, but Will is sagging into him like a sail gone slack, the hand that had pressed into Jack's shoulder grabbing for support, and she sighs and rolls out of bed and grabs a robe and stalks for the door.

Jack is still murmuring to Will, an increasingly-indecent susurration rising and falling in time with small thrusts of Will's hips, and it's become way too close in the small cabin. She throws herself through the door and up to the deck and sucks in fresh air gratefully.

The sky is aggressively blue and bare of clouds. The wind reaches up the loose sleeves of her indigo-printed robe and blows cleansingly over her skin. She realizes she's lost her sash and wraps the robe more tightly around her slender waist ( _wrong_ , she thinks) as the mate on watch comes up to report.

"Captain," he begins, and she mostly tunes out; the ship is still on course, nothing of note has been spotted, Young Will has spent most of the morning employed in the galley but could be sent aft if he's wanted.

"Hmm," she says, picturing the scene still surely going on in the cabin behind her, "Perhaps not," and she goes to find him.

She lets herself walk a little slowly, savoring the trim construction, thrilling a little, like she always still does, at the complex precision of lines and sails overhead. She stops to lay her palm against the mainmast, imagining all the power of the wind channeling through it and down to the slice of hull against water, before ducking into the galley and smiling hopefully.

Young Will is scouring a pot large enough that he's head-and-shoulders into it, but when he hears her footsteps he jerks himself out, scowls at her furiously, and bolts.

"That's going well," she sighs to the cook, trying to sound wry and patient and not sad and frustrated. No one lasts long on her crew without a good deal of discretion and an acceptance of things much stranger than a ten-year-old in a snit; the cook simply nods sympathetically, shrugging his shoulders a little, and asks if she'll be taking her coffee.

Young Will is undoubtedly up in the foretop; for a moment she considers scampering up after him (easier than ever, now, to pull herself up lightly by fingers and toes) and then she recalls what she's wearing and what she's not wearing and the spectacle she would present to those on deck. It's nothing they haven't seen before - she'd once, roused urgently from her cabin, steered through a sudden squall in nothing but her hat, her sword, and Young Will slung to her breast - but coffee and dignity are an appealing delay in the dragging campaign against her unforgiving offspring. She takes her cup and, sipping it, makes her way back to her cabin.

There's an embarrassing moment at the door when she stops and wonders whether to knock - she hates showing hesitation in front of her crew - before squaring her shoulders and ducking through the doorway. It is, after all, her own cabin.

Will and Jack are slumped against the wall, more lying than sitting, Will's head on Jack's shoulder. The cabin reeks of sex. Jack looks up at her heavy-lidded as she enters.

"Coffee?" he says hopefully, and she sighs and hands it to him. Will perks up at the smell and frowns a little as the cup goes past him: "Hey!"

"He asked," she tells Will, shrugging out of the cotton robe and into a pair of loose breeches. She really needs to make the time to take in her clothes.

"My King is generous," Jack croons, all curled-lip smile. "What might a humble subject like myself be doing for you this morning?" His gaze skims down her appreciatively, like he can think of several places to start.

"You might begin by repairing the mattress," she says, trying for wry again, but she suspects it comes out tart. She gestures at the big hammock and the mound of feathers pooling hopefully in the middle, waiting for a big enough roll of the ship to set the hammock swinging and them flying out all over.

"Ah," Jack says, "Yes, that," and Will blushes, eyes darting to the bed and back. "Elizabeth," he starts, and, all at once mortified and afraid that that's a note of _apology_ in his voice, she slams back out to the deck, barely pausing to snatch her hat and sword on the way.

"Gah!" she shouts, back outside her cabin, and glares furiously at one of the men when he looks up inquisitively. He hastily ducks his head and she stomps crossly to the starboard railing, one more reason to be disgusted with herself. She's still barefoot and the well-holystoned deck is smooth and warm and familiar under her feet. The brightwork is gleaming in the sun. Not smiling would be like fighting the tide.

"Oh, _Nell_ ," she sighs softly, "What a mess I've made."

Talking to the ship is an old habit. In the first early years, Will unreachable, Jack keeping his distance, and herself taking on and putting off half her hands every time she put in to port, trying to assemble a functional crew, she'd had nobody else, and it had been soothing, nights, to lean her head against the mainmast and confide her thoughts of the day. At the very first, of course, she hadn't even had that: she remembers standing on the beach for hours, after Will left, staring at a horizon where he wasn't any more, until she looked around and realized she was absolutely alone, the empty beach stretching away to both sides. There'd been a horrible moment when she thought she'd gone and marooned herself in the urgency of her long-overdue wedding night, until she recalled which jut of rock hid the longboat they'd pulled up out of reach of the high tide. Still, there she was, no sail, no provisions, no charts or compass, no funds, no companions, no idea what she was doing next. By the time she'd rowed back into Shipwreck Cove, hands bleeding on the oars, she'd almost forgotten there were things that talked back when you muttered to them, and she'd spent the next months of her studies with Teague and her search for a worthy ship talking to walls and statues and dead things washed up on the beach, which, as it turned out, were only marginally less likely to answer her coherently than Teague was. The _Penelope_ had seemed a downright welcoming ear by the time she'd found her and named her and cleaned her up, and by the time she'd settled her crew and rescued Jack and figured out how to get messages to Will, the habit was firmly fixed.

"I really thought it was going to be easier once we got him back," she says now, leaning back against the railing. "Young Will running wild? His father will sort him out. Another spat with Jack? We just need Will to balance us."

She frowns down at the deck, turns to look out at the azure sea. "It might even have worked if we'd just had a little breathing space." But things are never that simple; there always seems to be _something_ \- a misconstrued message, a sudden hurricane, an enchanted necklace, a plague of frogs - and there they are tearing around again with their swords out. This time there'd been a magic ring (Will having turned out to harbor a secret guilt over never having given her a wedding ring) and mermaids. "Way too many mermaids," she tells the ship reprovingly.

There's a grommet in the rail and it stares unblinkingly back at her. "Oh, fine," she says, sighing. "Not the mermaids' fault. Entirely my own." She pauses. "And a little bit Jack?" Yeah - she wouldn't buy the wheedling tone in her voice either; it's the same one Young Will uses for his excuses, which are always creative and rarely plausible. Jack plying her with tempting but ultimately ill-advised drink is practically a staple of their relationship; she really has no one but herself to blame for not realizing that water from the Fountain of Youth should go on the same list as rum, sake, and yohimbe tea.

"I drank it," Elizabeth admits to the grommet, "And now - "

Now is of course when she spots the birds. At first she thinks they're just gulls - but they're far out to sea for gulls, and there's something wrong with the way they're swooping down out of the sun, they're too far away for how close they are. The lookout in the crow's nest is shouting and she calls for her glass. _Stations_ , she thinks, but Will and Jack are both on board and won't she look the fool raising the alarm over a couple of birds. Her spyglass is placed into her outstretched palm and she looks up and then she does call stations. They're not gulls at all, they're some kind of osprey, four of them, and huge - they must be the size of ponies, with wings long as topsail yards. They're diving for her ship.

"Rifles!" she bellows, but the first bird is already on top of them and, neatly as you please, plucks the shrieking lookout out of the crow's nest and beats back up into the sky.

Her blood turns to ice - Young Will is up in the fore rigging.

"Rifle!" she yells again, "Rifle!" and they're being broken out, but not fast enough - the second osprey hovers a moment by the foremast and then flaps back, a small struggling figure in its claw.

"Will!" she screams, and someone puts a rifle in her hand. She aims, but she can't get a clear shot. The bird's holding Will between her and its heart, and anyways it's too far up, too fast, he's a good diver but the height - no.

Instead she drops the rifle, checks her sword, takes a deep breath, and leaps up into the rigging. Grabs hold with one hand and one toe and leans out as far as she can, out away from the ship, waving her hat wildly with the other hand, and shouting "Me! Take me!"

The other pair of osprey are closing fast. Will and Jack finally come stumbling out of the cabin, Jack shirtless, Will still hopping and tugging on a boot. They stare at her and there's no time to explain; "Will!" she calls, and Jack, impossibly, nods, grins at her, and swings up into the opposite rigging. Will moves to go after him. "No!" she barks. The giant birds are swooping down in parallel, wing to wing, coming straight for them; they bank out, split by the bow, and each rake down one side of the ship, snapping loose lines. "Follow us!" she shouts at Will, and then an enormous claw closes around her and she's yanked from the rigging. Her stomach lurches and she's being borne up into the air.

The ship dwindles rapidly beneath her. She can't see Jack, she can only assume he was snatched by the other osprey. Her crew are bringing the ship around but it's slow, already so far behind them as they soar up and away. The _Penelope_ is just a toy boat on a sparkling pond, and then she sees, next to it, a great roiling marring the wrinkled surface of the sea. " _Good_ Will," she growls, and the _Dutchman_ breaks the surface like the sudden bloom of a tiny white flower, and then they're out of her sight.

She realizes that she's cold, she's dangling uncomfortably, her hat is still clenched in her hand. But she's very much alive, and it gives her hope that Young Will, however far up ahead, is too.

The _Penelope_ is fast but the _Dutchman_ is faster; faster still beneath the waves, sailing on the deep currents, taking shortcuts through otherworld passages. If he needs to, Will can surface his ship in any waters; he can bring her up in a lake a thousand miles from shore, that has never touched salt. Although he says it tends to give them all headaches.

She's hoping they won't be flying a thousand miles. Her eyes and nose are streaming and she's finding it hard to draw breath, from the tight claw around her or some inherent weakness of the air, like she's heard is found around mountain peaks.

The monotonous blank ocean goes by beneath her, and her mind wanders.

"I found the Fountain of Youth once", Jack had said, that day on the shore, the last of the mermaids shooed back into the water and Will romping with a delighted son, and she'd been giddy with the sudden understanding of how Jack never seemed to get older, with the relief of all of her fears of what it would mean to live mortal with Will, stirred up by his face that ten years had not touched. Jack had offered her the flask and she'd only wondered why he hadn't done it sooner, years ago, as her twenties had waned and she'd struggled to keep up with Young Will's boundless energy.

She'd hardly thought. She'd drunk.

It was fizzy in her mouth like you sometimes got with spring water, and strangely sweet. The back of her neck tingled pleasurably.

She felt it in her skin first, a sunbeam warmth, and she'd looked at her hands to see the leather of ten years on deck soften, pock marks and powder burns erasing before her eyes. She and Jack had watched curiously while her bosom visibly rose beneath her waistcoat, turning back to the high, tight and tiny breasts long since spent suckling Young Will. She'd felt it lower, too, in the soft paunch of belly that no amount of swordplay and short rations ever seemed to touch, between her legs where things had never been quite right since the moonlit night Young Will had ripped his way out. She'd coughed and spat when her gold teeth had fallen into her mouth, pushed out by teeth growing back in ("a tooth for every child", the midwife had told her, but Young Will was a lusty feeder and she'd lost three).

She'd felt great, full of bounce like a new sail. Jack had brushed her cheek appreciatively and wandered lower for a little squeeze, and she'd giggled and hopped up and run down the beach to show Will.

Will had stopped and stared and smiled one of those slow smiles she felt all over. Then Young Will had looked up from the tide pool he was investigating and stared too.

"Mama?" he had said, like he almost never still called her, wanting to sound grown-up calling her "Captain" like the crew. "Mama?" His forehead had wrinkled. Then his face had crumpled like the start of one of his long-ago tantrums, and he'd grabbed the nearest thing at hand - a hapless sea cucumber from the tide pool - thrown it at her, and taken off down the beach away from her.

She'd stood stunned while Will and Jack had chased after him and calmed him down. He'd acknowledged her sullenly when they walked him back to where she waited by the longboat, but that night he'd turned away from her kiss when she'd come to see him in his hammock and told her he wasn't a baby any more.

"He'll come around," Will told her, rubbing her back, but it had been nearly a month and he hadn't. He would grudgingly sit with her for his lessons, it having been impressed on him long since that they were part of his duties at sea and to refuse them would constitute mutiny, but fled the second she closed the book. He didn't join in her swims. He didn't run to her any more with the latest Turk's Head or Monkey's Fist he'd learned to tie.

Youth was proving disappointing in other ways as well. More often than not, now, with the first passion of reunion fading, she finds herself sitting by the cabin window looking out while Will and Jack couple in the hammock behind her. She runs her hands over her flat stomach and narrow hips and tells herself she's being ridiculous, that when she'd actually been twenty she'd been desperate for touch, ravenous, reaching and reaching for Will who kept backing away, determined to wait for their wedding night. What kind of pirate was such a damned _gentleman_ , she had asked herself crossly, and pondered showing up at his door with a sign round her neck reading "plunder me now". But now she doesn't want to be plundered. Now her body is turned strange to her, and she's lost, the familiar cartography of her stretch marks gone blank and directionless. No more map, no more treasure. The rum is gone.

Elizabeth shakes her head a little to clear it and realizes the wind is whistling in a new way; they're dropping, coming closer to ocean where she can see waves breaking. They curve down and she can see grey cliffs to her left, spotted and streaked with white. An enormous nest flashes past, two, and then she's buffeted by air as the osprey sweeps its wings to halt itself, and drops her down.

Her bare feet are numb and she stumbles on the uneven surface, but she has her sword out and is whirling around before the bird has even settled to the edge of the nest. She stabs up with all her strength, dodging the great keel of breastbone and driving in towards the heart. The bird screams and she thrusts until she's sunk to the wrist in feathers; the bird's head whips back and it falls majestically, sliding down off her sword to plummet backwards, wings coming up to hide its dead accusing eye. _One_ , she thinks grimly, not waiting to see it hit, and pivots again. Two swings suffice to behead the young, their blind bulging eyes like some ghastly dark fruit.

She looks around. The nest is made mostly of dried sea-wrack. It's littered with shards of broken eggshell; her feet are already cut and bleeding. She's on a ledge in a cracked and weathered cliff a good mast's-height above the pounding waves; it continues above her, bending in to some unseen top.

She can hear a cacophony of screechs somewhere above her, and is about to start climbing when Jack falls on his head in front of her. She is blasted by an anguished skree as the bird that dropped him spots her decapitated offspring.

"Sorry," Elizabeth snarls, and, "Thanks," to Jack, as she grabs the pistol from his belt, turns, and shoots pinpoint-center into the yellow ring of one baleful eye. It drops away down the cliffside.

"Bullseye," Jack says quietly, rolling to his feet. "Where?"

" _Thank_ you," she says again. He's a stronger climber than she is, faster. "Up, I think."

"Turners," Jack mutters, already climbing. "Of course, where the noise is. Where else?"

She doesn't let herself think what might be up there. She focuses on her hands and feet, following Jack up the rock, keeping an eye on his boots receding above her until he's up and past an overhang she can't easily scale. By the time she works her way sideways the squawking is deafening, and as she pulls herself over she looks up to see that Jack is now hanging around the neck of one bird by his legs, hacking at its back with his sword, while another one tries to dodge its flailing wings to tear at him with its vicious hooked beak.

"Oh, Jack," she thinks fondly, and draws off and dispatches the second while Jack deals with the first. There's an inevitable bit where he ends up riding the giant osprey while it zooms around trying to dislodge him, but she doesn't stay to watch him throttle it with his belt, or whatever he ends up doing; she's climbing into the nest.

At the far side, against the rock face, there's a little fortress made of pieces of eggshell. The lookout crouches under one big piece, held over his head like a shield; another long sharp shard is braced against the back of the nest like a javelin, and under it, half-buried in the sea-wrack, is her son.

"Mama," he calls, "Mama, Mama, Mama," and she falls to her knees and he comes running to her. He flings his arms around her neck and she buries her face in his shoulder and cries.

"Mama, you came for me," he sobs into her hair, and she holds him tighter and tells him of course, of course, of course.

He's done before she is, pulling back and stiffening his lip. She grabs him by the upper arms and puts her face right in his. "I will _always_ love you," she says firmly. "No matter what I look like, whether I look thirty or twenty or _ten_ , if I've got lungs to say it or gills like a fish to go glub glub or get turned into a _camel_ again, I will _always_ still want you and I will _never_ be sorry I'm your mama."

"I knew that," he scoffs, but she sees some tiny doubt in him relaxing.

"Even if you're mad at me," she says. "Even if you're so mad you don't speak to me for years and years. What's on my flag?" she asks suddenly.

"Winged hourglass," he replies automatically, confused.

"And what's it mean?" she follows.

"It means your time is running out and you should just surrender rather than try to fight," he answers.

"Well, right, but besides that," she prompts.

"It means - oh, it means you were waiting for my dad?" he says.

"Right," she says, "I waited for him for _ten years_ , so don't you ever think that a few weeks could change the way I feel about you."

"What if," he says, "What if we go back to London with Cap'n Jack and the King says "these eleven days were so terrible let's just pretend they never happened" again? Would you still love me those days even if they weren't on the calendar any more?"

"Yup," she says. "Did that time too."

"And what if," he goes on, "What if I find the Northwest Passage so everyone can sail that way to trade with Japan and then I can rob them and be Pirate Lord of the Arctic Ocean and I don't vote for you for King in the Brethren Court? You won't be sorry then?"

"I might knit you some nice warm earmuffs," she says earnestly, and Young Will laughs; some of the men knit but she always ends up fencing him with the needles when they try to learn.

"Aw," she hears behind her. Jack is scrambling over the edge of the nest. His hair is so full of feathers it looks like the back end of a turkey and he's holding his hat clenched in his teeth by the brim, but he's okay.

"Cap'n Jack!" Will shouts, and runs to him. "Cap'n Jack, I got carried off by a giant eagle and it tried to tear Yan limb from limb but it just pulled off his peg leg and boy was it confused and then we hid under the shells and Mama came and fought them and saved us and I made friends with Hector and I'm going to fly on his back when he grows up!"

Jack nods encouragingly, appropriately wide-eyed. "Yan?" he looks over to where the lookout still crouches, clutching the eggshell. "Get up man, you look like a turtle. And... Hector?"

Elizabeth is also wondering. Hector?

A pile of fluff she'd taken for loose feathers gets up and toddles over to Young Will, laying its monstrous head against his thigh. "I fed him Yan's lunch," Will explains, ruffling its feathers gently. "He's my friend now."

"CHEEBLE," Hector answers.

Elizabeth looks warily at the beak that could surely sever her son's hand. "Will..." she starts, but Jack is beaming. "Hector! Excellent! They named the monkey Jack, you know," he says to her in an aside, "It's more than fair really. Now William," he suggests, "Why don't you gather up some nice big long feathers we can stick in our hats and cut into quills and use to draw really splendid treasure maps while I just have a word with your mum here."

He slings an arm around her waist and makes little scooting motions at Young Will until he rolls his eyes and turns and starts gathering feathers.

"Not bad for the terrified vague fingers, eh?" Jack says to Elizabeth, wiggling his at her. "My thighs got quite the caressing there, let me tell you. Score one for the staggering girl, one less strange heart beating, no more feathered glory..."

"Yes, Jack?" she asks reluctantly.

"The thing is, on the topic of the, er, brute blood of the air," he says from the side of his mouth. "I got a good look at the cliff flying around out there on old Beaky, and, well, ever seen a puffin roost?"

"How many?" she asks, her heart sinking.

"Eight or nine," he says, and that's not so bad, they've no more powder and shot but they can probably cut down - "Dozen?" he finishes weakly.

"Good _god_ ," she says, so taken aback she's more perplexed than afraid, "What do they _eat_?"

"Maybe it's the island of unusually-sized rodents or something," Jack says dismissively, "The point being, if we don't want it to be _us_ , we've got to get out of here, savvy? It's only so long before they notice we've done for their mates, here, and then - " he makes a two-handed gesture that might under other circumstances mean "I want to grab your breasts" but in this circumstance probably means, alas, "a vast flock of humongous ravening birds will descend upon us."

"Right," she says shortly. "Any ideas?"

"There's a deep crack in the rock about a hundred feet along," he tells her. "Wide enough to chimney, narrow enough to block them, if it goes in deep enough. But we'll be exposed like a tray of oysters the way over."

She looks around, peers over the edge down the cliff. It's steep, sheer, but not quite vertical; if she climbed back down to the first ledge she could _probably_ make the dive, but she's not completely sure; less so about Young Will, even less so about one-legged Yan. Plus she has no idea what submerged rocks may be just out of sight beneath the waves, nor how cold the water might be...

Jack sees her looking. "Cliff cuts in about fifty feet that way," he says, pointing the other way. "Big overhang, we'd have a clean drop straight down."

The ledge is wider that way, more traversable for Yan than clinging to toe holds. She looks over the edge again. The fallen osprey corpses have washed away from the base of the cliff, suggesting it's at least deep enough for them not to have lodged aground.

"The crack is a trap," she tells Jack, "What next, once we're jammed in there?"

He nods. "Could do with a dip," he says easily. "Refreshing-like."

"All right," she says in her Captain voice, motioning to Yan and Young Will, "Here's how we do it. I lead, Will follows, Jack next, Yan brings up the rear." It's a little cold - if it comes to a fight, Yan would be better off in the middle with Young Will and the two strong swords on either end - but Will is safer this way and that always comes first, her crew all know that.

"What about Hector?" Young Will asks.

"Oh, honey," she says, trying not to look nervously up the cliff for incoming osprey. "This is Hector's home. I think he'd better stay here."

"But you killed his parents," Will points out reasonably. "He won't have anybody to feed him if he stays here. He'll die."

"Great!" is obviously not the right answer, but it must show in her eyes because Will drops to his knees, flings his arms around Hector's patchy neck, and announces that he's not leaving without him. Hector preens his hair affectionately.

She could order his obedience, but expediency wins out: "He brings up the rear," she concedes, and they start making their way along the ledge, which narrows rapidly from the beam of a good-sized ship to the width of a mere plank.

Hector seems contented to hop along behind. Yan is less so, and she can hear him whispering to Jack, "What is this plan, now? If we don't splatter when we hit, those foul things will just scoop us from the water! This is madness!"

Jack just shushes him. She can look up, now, and back along the cliff, and see dozens of nests, the broad shadows of osprey swooping in and out. If she can see them, she thinks, then they can see her...

The ledge narrows further, and they inch along. Young Will is on her heels, clearly tempted to cling to her instead of the rock. He knows better from years in the rigging, but this is no friendly mast-top; he's breathing in tight little gasps, trying not to panic.

"Here," Jack says almost silently, and she stops. The water below is black and forbidding, and very, very far down.

"No way," Yan says suddenly "I'm going back. Move, bird." Hector, between him and retreat, cocks his head at him and does not move.

"Ssshh!" Elizabeth hisses, but Yan doesn't. "Scoot! Shoo!" he says more loudly. Way up above them, one of the wheeling raptors seems to pause, look down.

Behind Yan's head, Jack raises a hand to near his collar, looks back at Elizabeth. She knows the dark question he's asking: throw him off, hope the bird doesn't notice the rest of them?

She shakes her head. She wishes it was altruism, but a screaming Yan will only draw more attention.

The osprey drops its head to dive. Four or five others are poised to follow. The cliff behind them has started to chirrup and chatter; soon they'll all be in the air.

"Time to go," she says, and pauses: out on the water, there's a spot beginning to bubble and seethe. "Our ride's here," she adds, low and triumphant.

"I love that man," Jack breathes, and she couldn't agree more.

In Elizabeth's oldest fantasy, she and Will don't stay behind when Jack escapes from his execution at Port Royal. Even before the wedding and the warrants, she'd known at some level they didn't really belong there any more. They were pirates, they needed the freedom of the seas, and it was theirs to take, not anyone's to give. (She liked to imagine, at least, that she'd have felt no shame breaking her farce of a betrothal to Norrington.) So in her fantasy, instead of standing there watching dumbly while Jack toppled back over the edge, they all go: she and Will link elbows with Jack and she smiles a goodbye at her old life and they throw themselves back into the free air, laughing all the way down to the warm embrace of the sea. She'd missed it the first time, stupidly unconscious; she wants the rush of the air around her, the wind whipping her hair and her long skirt fluttering, the grip of Jack's elbow tucking hers to his side. She'd done back dives off the stern of the _Penelope_ , pretending, wishing Will and Jack were there to pretend with her.

This isn't anything like that. The osprey dives, the _Dutchman_ surfaces, and she pulls Young Will up to her, crosses her arms around his chest, tucks his head under her chin, and jumps tight and straight and down. The black water zooms up at her and she has just enough time to recall a fragment of prayer from her childhood, _Our father, who art in heaven_ , and she points her toes and the sea hits.

It feels like a board breaking across her feet, like the wallop of a gun recoil. It's worse than the bastinado and she only doesn't scream because she's already under water. Young Will's skull clocks her in the jaw and he comes loose from her grasp. She plunges down until she thinks her ears will burst, finally slowing to a stop in the dim green. Young Will is above her; she kicks up towards him, grabs him and kicks on for the surface, gasping and spluttering as they break into the air.

She's just in time to see Jack cleave the water neatly, hands over his head in a proper dive.

She looks up - the lead osprey has broken off its dive and is pulling away. She hears the boom of a cannon and realizes that Will is shelling the nests, well away from their position, distracting the birds and holding them off.

Jack comes up near her, appearing and disappearing as the waves lift and drop them, and she starts to think about putting some distance between them and the rock of the cliffs. Young Will is trying to turn to her; her ears are still ringing but she thinks he's saying "Wow, Mama, wow!" He's okay, she thinks. He's okay.

There's one more bad moment when she realizes her swimming is nowhere near strong enough to resist the push of the waves towards the rocks; she treads for a moment, trying not to panic, and then does panic when hands reach up from the waves to latch onto her. They hold her up rather than dragging her down, though, and it turns out Will has half his deathless, tireless, water-breathing crew in the sea around them, ready to tow them back to the _Dutchman_. She sees Jack and Yan similarly assisted and has a brief moment of uncharitable hope until she sees Hector bob to the surface behind them and hop up to perch serenely on a sailor's back.

They drop a ladder over the side for her and she climbs up right behind Young Will; Will reaches down as he nears the top and lifts him the rest of the way into the ship, rocking him and kissing his forehead until Young Will kicks and wriggles. Then Will sets him down and looks at her, over his head, as she stands there soaked and dripping. He's opening his mouth to speak when Jack vaults over the side, hails him as a hero, and dips him into a long, dramatic, smouldering kiss, Young Will making "yuck" faces as if he expects her to intervene.

She doesn't. It turns out Yan's broken his good leg and they have to haul him aboard in a rope sling, and so she oversees that - he's her man - and by the time he's settled and splinted and dosed with rum, Jack and Will have vanished.

The _Dutchman_ can't sail the deep ways with mortal passengers on board; she spends most of the long cruise back to rendezvous with the _Penelope_ watching Young Will try to train Hector to sit and stay. Hector persists in bobbling after him until they eventually collapse into a sleepy heap together, nested in a coil of rope. Will and Jack emerge somewhere around the third hour but disappear again when she assures Will she can make it back to the _Penelope_ without starving, food being an amenity Will only lays in store when he plans for guests.

She doesn't really wish they'd joined Jack's crew on the _Pearl_ , she knows. She can't wish a minute of those years different, in case the tiniest change of course led her away from Young Will. There might have been other children, if she'd never betrayed Jack, if Will had never been cursed, but not her star, her North, her unsinkable boy. And who was to say it wouldn't have ended like this anyways, stumbling across Jack and Will rutting down in the orlop, watching them from the wheel as they sat astride the bowsprit sharing a bottle and kisses. Or worse, being put off on some lonely dock, watching them sail away, the affection dried up along with the passion.

She wonders what they're doing right now, if they're pinning Young Will's collected feathers to their hats, trying to decide which look jaunty and which just look ridiculous, or if they're flipping through Jack's little pocket copy of the _I Modi_ , trying to decide what they feel like doing next. Maybe they're locked tight together, kissing, or one is braced above the other, moving slowly, so slowly... she thinks fleetingly of going to find them, seeing for herself what they're up to, but she's forgotten how it works, inviting herself in, if it ever has. Ten long years and she forgets it's just been a few short weeks they've all been together, free to join in pairs or threes without any fear of magical reprisals.

She'd realized, on the long row back to Shipwreck Cove, that she had no idea what her part of the curse actually entailed. She needed to be true to Will - but what did that mean, specifically? Just to be there when he returned? And not to marry anyone else in the meantime, obviously, nor lie with any man, she assumes, but what about love never consummated? What about kissing? Maybe the curse objected to country dancing, but would allow a minuet? Did it matter what Will himself minded, and what he didn't? Not that he was around to be asked, but maybe it went by his feelings on the matter. Or maybe it was Calypso's opinion that mattered, and how was she to know how the morals of an ancient sea goddess lined up with those of a well-bred English girl? Or a Pirate King? What if Will had taken a matelot, could he still share her with him in his own absence? What if she herself wanted to lie with a woman? Or - she'd blushed to think of it - she'd seen a most intriguing piece of carved ivory in the Singapore bath house, its purpose clear even to her virginal eyes. Such recreations could certainly not be called chastity - but were they adultery?

She laughs to herself now, remembering the curtain of sheerest silk she'd hung down the middle of _Penelope_ 's cabin, undressing for Jack with a candle behind her, watching as he put on his own shadow play. Later, testing, feeling out the limits of the curse, they'd dispensed with the curtain, and she'd given him instructions, watching while he did as she bade. He'd returned from a trip to the East Indies and presented her with an ivory device like she'd seen in Singapore; she'd found a wooden one for him in Zanzibar...

Her laugh peters out and she sighs; total freedom seems to be an inspiration for Jack and Will, but it hasn't turned out that way for her, not with either of them. She's had more of Will in some ways, and less in others. They'd figured out sometime in year six (after she'd learned to send him letters by sealing them in bottles and tucking them into dead men's shrouds) that not only could he not set foot on land, he couldn't even _surface_ : coming up into air made the whole crew start turning back into fish. It was reversible, but it made everyone itchy and cross for _weeks_ , and she found it impossible to make satisfying love keeping half an eye out for her partner to start sprouting fins. Will, on the other hand, didn't need to breathe, and she was a strong swimmer; they'd spent so much time floating around in shark-free lagoons when they figured out _that_ one that Will had built up a backlog of souls to ferry and had had to cut back to a monthly appointment. She would dive down to meet him and kiss him in the turquoise light half a fathom down, her hair swirling around them. Then she'd surface, sculling with her hands, looking down through the water at his face, his hands on her parted thighs. He'd said, at one point in that first long night after the curse was broken, that he could tell her taste despite the salt of the sea around her.

They'd talked, that night, more than they'd loved. He hadn't even had the comfort of sending letters; they'd heard each other's voices in tiny moments, a few words exchanged when he broke the surface to greet Young Will. Every precious minute he could steal above the water went to his son; the curse had grown less forgiving, with the years, until he could barely tip his head back and lift his face from the water before it crusted over with fish-scales. Time enough for Young Will to squeak out a hello, but no questions, no answers. They had all swum together, of course, chasing sea turtles and pestering somnolent clams, but they'd looked forward to the day the curse would lift and Will could walk freely on land, the _Dutchman_ truly servant and not master, the day her life would finally be perfect... she shakes her head. Her fantasies at thirty are just as foolish as her fantasies at twenty.

They finally arrive back at the _Penelope_ (Will's power to find any ship on the seas is always coming in handy) and lay a plank from the _Dutchman_ down to her ship. Yan is toted across, and a sleeping Young Will and, tempted as she is to leave him behind, Hector. Jack and Will are nowhere to be seen and it will not surprise her if Jack stays with Will for awhile, on the _Dutchman_ , as long as Will can put off his undersea duties. She's a little miffed they're not even here to see her off, though, and she walks the plank as slowly and grudgingly as if it led to a watery grave and not her own bonny ship.

She's just stepping down off it when Will and Jack march out of the _Dutchman's_ cabin. Seeing her already back on the _Penelope_ , they frown, step smartly across the plank, look at each other and at her, and then move to flank her, picking her up bodily by the elbows.

"Hey," she squawks, "Eek, what?"

"We miss you," Will says quietly, and she's stunned enough to not protest while they march her back to her own cabin. Jack explains very courteously, as he passes her first mate, that the Captain is indisposed after her ordeal and the watch better have a damned good reason for disturbing her. Her crewmen, she sees, are _smirking_ at her.

Inside the cabin, Jack hands her off to Will, who swoops her up into his arms, while he stops to secure the latch on the door.

Will dumps her down on the hammock and starts pulling off his boots.

"This is ridiculous," she starts, and Will leans over and kisses her into silence.

His lips are warm; after so many years of kissing him wet and cool, he feels practically feverish. She can open her mouth without her air escaping. She can hear him breathe.

Jack circles around to stand behind her.

"There'll be no more mumbling about _rich and strange_ ," he tells her. "I've seen you handle your sword, now; you're as sure in your skin as ever."

"I wish I'd seen it," Will says, "You all lithe and fierce, and those birds never knowing what hit them..."

"Don't tell me you're not getting your fill of sword-handling," Elizabeth says.

"Are _you_? Besides," Will tells her, cupping his hand lightly over the front of her breeches, "I've heard too much time with swords is a sign I need to find myself a girl." Her hips lift involuntarily.

"Looks like we've found one," Jack says, and pulls her hair back from her face; Will kisses her again.

She moves to bring her hands up to Will's shoulders and Jack catches them.

"Remember the time I caught up with you off the Gold Coast?" he asks. "You had just taken a British slaver and had all your men busy opening shackles; I asked what you were doing and you said you hated to see anyone in bondage."

"Let me guess," Will says, raising his head to look at her and Jack both, "'You must not be doing it right?'"

She laughs. "'You must not be doing it right,'" she agrees, and Jack holds her hands and looks down at her and says, very low, "You must not be doing it right, love," and the shiver runs down from the top of her head to the tips of her fingers and still-sore toes.

He's winding cord around her wrists now, weaving it into the mesh of the big hammock.

"Hey now," she says, and Will skates his fingers across her lips.

"We're villains and knaves," he says in her ear, "We're devils," and she recognizes the silly song she's taught him and Jack and Young Will, but it sounds different the way he's saying it.

"Oh," she says, "Well," and Will kisses her neck, "Arrr? Shiver me timbers?"

"Oh, we intend to," Jack whispers. "Yo ho." He lowers a silk scarf tenderly across her eyes and Will rips open her shirt and she thinks, already breathless, that she mourned the rum prematurely.

***

Something is tickling her belly; she blinks awake to brush away the fine strands of Will's hair where he bends over her.

"Ah, he says with satisfaction, "Our Queen awakes."

" _King_ ", Elizabeth corrects Will for what seems like the dozenth time, although she's starting to suspect it's just an early instance of many, many more. "Queen of the Pirates is a totally different job."

"And it's not one you're particularly interested in," Will parrots back at her, "I have been listening to the speech, my most irascible love. 'Most people think it's a dull job and the position's been vacant since Jack got too beardy to do justice to the costume,' right?"

Elizabeth rolls her eyes. "It's the name of the job," she says. "And as I _happen_ to hold it, your King has a few royal edicts for you this morning..."

"It wasn't the beard anyways" Jack drawls as Will sets happily to work on the first of her demands. "It was the corset, it just didn't do _me_ justice. Now I've heard tell of a magic girdle, wrought by the gods out of pure gold, that gives the wearer the ardency to satisfy any number of admirers..."

It's half erotic narrative and half sales pitch and Elizabeth sighs happily. Her son, her ship, her men, eternal youth, and now a quest - a pirate's life for her!

\- - -

**Author's Note:**

> The dialogue at the end about kings and queens is stolen from Patricia Wrede's excellent Dealing With Dragons, the osprey are modeled on Sinbad's rocs, Jack is quoting a poem that Yeats won't write until the 20th century because he's Captain Jack Sparrow, he can do that.


End file.
